The Wannabe Tiger

Having finally got round to mowing all the long grass at the bottom of the garden I thought it a good idea to fix the trail camera on a low post looking at that area.



The trail camera. IR night lighting at the top. Three passive infra red sensors at the bottom. (one pointing forwards and the others angled at 45 degrees). Camera in the middle.

Left it for a couple of days and discovered, though it worked, it worked too well.
The only stranger captured was this wannabe tiger strolling through:







Camera set up to take three shots in fairly quick succession every time it is triggered.

Of course you can guess who always features at some time or other:



But, there was a big problem. The branches, top left and right, waft about in the slightest breeze and keep triggering the camera during sunny daylight hours. That resulted in hundreds, and I mean hundreds, of photos with not a life form in sight and a lot of extra drain on the batteries. There is a lower setting for sensitivity but that risks missing anything of interest. For the moment it has been moved back to its original position.

I did consider a few other solutions.
1) set limits on the times it is operational.
2) use a higher pole and point the camera down more.
3) cut down the tree branches in its view.

With the first I would miss any daytime visitors.
The second wouldn't give me the profile view of visitors that I want.
I've done enough tree pruning for now. I want to keep some greenery.

Recently I made a start clearing the overgrown fruit cage.
There are more weeds and grass than anything else.
Then I can get rid of the blackcurrant bushes (not allowed to eat those any more).
Maybe plant more raspberry canes.
I stick to working outdoors before 9.30 a.m. to avoid the heat.

The 'Guess What' was ....

A few days ago I posted this close up



which was part of



a piece of cork tree bark.

Night Visitor

Every so often I put out the Floureon trail camera to see what night life there may be about.

 

Until the latest session there was little of note to be seen. This time, on just one night over the couple of weeks it was operating, it captured something different. I know there are foxes about and felt sure they must visit my garden occasionally. Here at last is the proof.





and half an hour later







Since then I have cut down much of the long grass.
Pure coincidence I did that on the same day the fox visited.






I don't put the camera out very often as it uses eight AA batteries.
Batteries work in two banks of four.
I must rig up a permanent 6V supply for it.
Then I can set it to take short video clips as well as stills.
Also I will fix it lower down to have a better view of smaller creatures.
This old camera has only 5M pixels and responds in 1 second.
I see many of the latest ones have a 12 - 16M pixel camera and a response time of less than 0.5 second. Tempting - if I get more night visitors.

Looking Waspish

Hoverfly on Thistle flower




Taken with Nikon Coolpix S9050

Harvest Time

The last local field of grain being harvested on a glorious sunny afternoon.

 




Shot at 1920 x 1080 and 50 fps on the M5. Mainly at 150mm zoom.
Hand held in blustery conditions.
No extra processing in iMovie apart from shortening the video clips and adding a soundtrack.

Guess What ....

... this is a photograph of.

Common Darter Dragonfly

First one obliged by allowing me to get within about four feet to photograph it while it rested in the garden.







Then I found another when we went walkabout down the lane



Both times they co-operated long enough to obtain some video



A bit wobbly as all were taken hand held.
All taken with the M5 and 18-150mm lens.

A Chance Encounter

Went looking for dragonflies down the lane and had a brief encounter with



a pair of Muntjac deer. Even with 150mm zoom they were hard to see.

Closer crop of the above photo



While watching them I only noticed one. When I saw the photo I could see there were a pair.
We were far enough away not to scare them and the wind was blowing towards us.
They slowly ambled away and disappeared from view.
Needless to say, Penny was just as interested as I was.

I've Got a Lovely Bunch of ....

..... fungi



These should be common enough but could I find a matching picture to identify them? Nope!
They appear to be of the Psathyrella family but which I know not.
Cannot be seen in this shot is the nearly buried piece of rotting tree branch they are growing on.
I guess they are about 20mm across.

Eyeing Up the Next Meal?

A Common Darter dragonfly seems to have its eyes on the green bottle fly.



A hurried shot with the Nikon Coolpix S9050

Plant Patterns

Just a few close shots of patterns on plants in my garden











It was good practice using the M5 with 28mm macro lens in very blustery conditions.
All taken in RAW, cropped and saved as 100% JPGs in Affinity Photo.

Minibeasts

An afternoon look round to see what minibeasts were about.

Bee on Bramble



Woodlouse on rotting wood



Ants on the same rotting wood





A moth, possibly AgriphilaTristella

 

Finally a spider

 

as yet unidentified.

Pollen Beetle Video Re-visited

In his comment yesterday Adrian (Adrian's Images) wondered how much it would be possible to crop the video clips from yesterday. I experimenting with what is know as a Ken Burns zoom in iMovie (where you set start and end sizes of crop and the software slowly moves from one to the other) on two of the clips. It worked better on the first one where the lens was just set to zoom as there is a better depth of field. The result: (no music this time)



Not at all bad.

Pollen Beetle - Video

OK. So I spent a bit more on the new set up. I found a mint condition used EF-M 28mm macro lens that I had my eye on. Lets me get within about an inch of a subject and has LED lighting built in round the front lens. No extra batteries needed as they take the power from the camera battery.





The LEDs are not over bright. Good enough when that close to a subject to add some illumination to darker areas of the subject. Switchable at two light intensities. Choice of left, right or both on.

I had looked round for something to test it on and found some flowers which had pollen beetles. It took three attempts. Just as I had the first fixed in place the beetle flew away. On the second attempt the beetle dropped off. It was a case of third time lucky.

After a few still photo takes I though it would be more interesting to make a video. One great facility when shooting video is the ability to use the touch screen and change the area for the lens to focus on. Either tap a new place or drag the focal area box to a new position for a smooth change in focus.



Enough ramble - on to the video. (No tweaking, exactly as taken at 1080p HD)



 
1st clip with the lens set to macro, the others with the setting on 'super macro'

Sunset

First decent colourful Sunset I've seen for ages.

Closer and Closer

Just received a Viltrox EF-S to EF-M adaptor, £29.99 from Amazon. It is a good solid metal build with gold plated contacts so all camera and lens facilities work. A genuine Canon one will set you back around £135

Thinking it was some time since I did a bit of macro photography I set things up:



Parts left to right:
Raynox DCR-250 Super Macro Conversion Lens surrounded by LED ring light.
Canon EF 70-200mm zoom lens.
Viltrox EF-S to EF-M adaptor
Canon M5 camera with LED light controller on top.

Subject - Hibiscus flower held in retort stand.
Camera fitted with wireless remote shutter control.
Lens set to 70mm, 4 focus stacked photos converted from RAW to JPG (100%)
Processed with Zerene Stacker then cropped.



Lens set to 200mm. Single photo.
Processed from RAW and tweaked in Affinity Photo.



Camera set to manual 1/80 sec f32

Soap Box Time

I've been looking round for a lightweight but sturdy camera tripod. My niggle here is that it appears all modern tripods use the 'quick release' gimmick. It may well release the camera quickly from the tripod. The problem is that unless you invest in several quick release plates it slows down the ability to change cameras. Personally I find them an annoyance if permanently fitted to a camera when using it hand held. Also I find a large knurled screw head on the old system much easier to use than the little D shaped wobbly handle on the screw in a quick release plate.

In the end I spent some time looking at used tripods built to the old standard with a fixed plate and locking screw / bolt. Each to their own. I guess we all have our favoured methods of working.

Moon

The Moon looked to be nice and clear last night. I fitted the adaptor to my 100-400mm zoom lens and attached the M5 to see what it could do. All was held steady on a tripod. It was the first time I found the facility to angle the screen useful as the camera was pointing up at a fair angle.

First I managed to capture the Moon with Jupiter which is really bright at the moment.
Jupiter is the white dot just showing near the bottom left of the photo.



Then a full zoom on just the Moon.
A cropped photo



Very pleased with the amount of detail captured.
Click on the photo to see it larger on my Flickr account.

New Lens

Looked at the available EF-M lenses to fit the Canon M5 and after reading reviews went for the EF-M 18-150mm. Here it is next to the Canon EF-S 17-85mm with adaptor which I used recently. Doesn't seem to be a lot of difference at first glance. The main one is the weight. The EF-S weighs in at 63g and the EF-M at 33g.



Also the weight balance is better when on the M5 body. The adaptor has no lenses in it so all the EF-S lens weight is moved further from the camera body. Much easier to handle the EF-M lens. In fact it felt very comfortable.



Within half an hour of it arriving we went on our usual mid afternoon walkabout.
The idea being to find a variety of subjects.
Nice and Sunny after a morning of heavy showers.

First a couple of 18mm / 150mm views









Seeing there were sheep about we wandered across for a closer look.



I though they would be ideal to try out the video. Wrong.
After looking us over they decided to move as far away as possible.



Oh well. There's always the Poplar trees ...



... and the new seating area in front of the cricket club.



Ash Tree from East and West views.

     

This crop looks about ready for harvesting.



Where do you park the heavy roller when not in use?
In the hedge of course.



The closest I could get to an Hibiscus flower.
A fairly good macro facility at 18mm.



A photo of Penny to finish off



All M5 photos taken in RAW, converted to virtually lossless jpgs.
No cropping or tweaking so this is how they came out of the camera.
Very pleased with everything so far.
There was a very strong, gusty wind blowing so some vegetation may be blurred.